Airlines Tighten Cockpit Security Following Germanwings Crash

Airlines around the world – including Air Canada, Air Berlin, EasyJet, and Norwegian Air Shuttle – are quickly moving to tighten security in cockpits, immediately putting into place new procedures to prevent flight crew from being left alone at the controls, even for a few minutes.

Update: March 27, 2015:Lufthansa today confirmed it would join the growing number of carriers that will require that two authorized persons "must be present in the cockpit at all times during a flight," the carrier said in a statement. The policy change will apply to all airlines in the Lufthansa airline family, including Swiss, Austrian, and Brussels, as well as Germanwings. Emirates, Icelandair, and WestJet also said they would adopt the new rule.

The moves come just 48 hours after an Airbus A320 operated by Lufthansa subsidiary Germanwings crashed into a mountain in the French Alps, killing all 150 on board, and just hours after authorities said they had potentially discovered the culprit behind the tragedy: 27-year-old Andreas Lubitz, the plane's co-pilot, who allegedly locked the captain out of the cockpit and then deliberately set the plane on its fatal path.

Lufthansa CEO Carsten Spohr said he would be considering changes in procedure for his entire airline group, which includes Swiss International Air Lines, Brussels Airlines, Austrian Airlines, Eurowings, and smaller regional airlines. It now seems clear that the commercial aviation industry is moving to adopt what has been standard practice in the U.S. after 9/11 – that if one pilot leaves the cockpit for a bathroom break or other reason, a flight attendant or other crew will take their place. The ostensible reason is to prevent a situation where a pilot could become incapacitated behind the locked door. Few airlines outside the U.S. have adopted this rule, until now.

According to Brice Robin, the Marseilles-based prosecutor leading the investigation, the captain exited the cockpit approximately 45 minutes into the flight from Barcelona to Düsseldorf. The co-pilot was alone in the cockpit and he then “manipulated the flight monitoring system keys so to accelerate the descent of the plane," Robin said during a press conference. "We could hear a number of appeals and calls from the pilot to access the cockpit."

Robin also discounted the possibility of a medical emergency, saying, “We heard a breathing noise, and we carried on hearing that kind of breathing until the final crash, which means that the co-pilot was still alive until the time of impact.”

Despite this new evidence from the cockpit voice recorder, which clearly caught the captain's unsuccessful attempts to re-enter the flight deck, aviation experts caution that it’s very early in the crash investigation to be pointing fingers; moreover, information from the critical flight data recorder is still missing.

Sadly the biggest mystery may remain for a while: that of the co-pilot's motivation for committing such a horrific act.